Works in progress: Charles Berg

  

Letter (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     I have a soft spot for folks who write letters to newspapers. Passionate, opinionated, often making excellent points, they're like amateur, shambolic, unpaid columnists. I owe my Chicago memoir to a frequent newspaper letter writer, Bill Savage, who midwifed the process.

     This is from a regular reader, Charles Berg, of Hyde Park-Kenwood, complained that the Sun-Times editorial page took a pass on it. I read what he had to say, and it made sense to me, so I asked him if I could share it on my blog. He enthusiastically agreed. Its headline is: "Trump Administration Financial Accounting."

     Most organizations – including governments – have budgets: estimates of the expenses of operation and the expected revenues needed to meet those expenses. Related to this are ongoing accountings of funds received and distributed.
     During this past year, vast sums of new incomes have been declared by the Trump administration: money from tariffs, money extorted from law firms, etc. There have also been savings by the refusal of the administration to fund programs established by Congress. Further, there have been the revocations of hundreds of millions of dollars of grants made for medical and scientific research – and threats of withholding of funds allocated to cities and states that do not comply with Trump’s edicts. And then there are the “donations” made by entities seeking to curry Trump’s favor (or forestall his ire).
     In addition, the ad hoc “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) was supposed to be cutting expenditures via elimination of “waste and fraud.” Many of their initials claims of massive savings have been disproven; their main goals were not financial – but rather the destruction of entities (like the Department of Education and international organizations) that the administration disliked. “Waste and fraud” turns out to have been nothing more than a convenient justification: NO efforts were made to identify and correct systemic problems.
     Where have the accumulated billions gone – what accounting is there? And what have these monies been used for? Clearly not for services benefitting the American public (many of those have been undercut or abolished). Clearly not to assist local law enforcement (despite the administration’s charges of lawlessness in some cities, like Chicago). Clearly not to protect our nation’s natural resources. Clearly not to promote the development of American industries. Clearly not to bring down inflation and the price increases affecting most Americans.
     How much of these funds have been used to pay for judicial assaults on Trump’s “enemies”? To pay recruitment bonuses to enlist Border Patrol and ICE agents to pursue the administration’s anti-immigration policies? To pay for their deployment to round up immigrants (seldom the “worst of the worst,” as claimed – while assaulting citizens and causing fear in the process)? To pay for Kristi Noem’s anti-immigration ads on radio and TV? To pay for legal defense against the many state and local lawsuits filed against the administration’s policies? Have some of these monies ended up in Trump’s own coffers?
     And now it has just been announced that Trump has sold $500,000,000 of seized Venezuelan oil – and put the money, not in the US Treasury, but in a bank in Qatar!! This is staring to remind me of the song in “Evita,” which includes the lyrics “When the money keeps rolling …you don't keep books … accountants only slow things down.”
      The American public should demand a fiscal accounting from the Trump administration – which, of course, will use all means possible to prevent this (denials, delays, refusals to comply with judicial orders and congressional acts, etc.).